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Female child soldiers with the Lord's Resistance Army struggle to return to normal

Though the guns are silent now, these women are still struggling to survive years after returning to their communities.

Beatrice Lumunu, 19, was abducted at 11 for one year. Beatrice says she was never able to go back to school after she came back from the bush with her child. She also has lingering health problems associated with her forced marriage in the LRA. (Marc Ellison Photo)

By Marc EllisonSpecial to the Star

Sat., May 19, 2012

KITGUM, UGANDA—How do you reconcile the two sides of Alice?

One moment she portrays herself as the victim of war, the next a cold-blooded killer.

She is a young woman full of contradictions.

Alice looks like a typical 19-year-old girl. Vivacious. Coy. Inseparable from her cellphone.

Yet she is dwog paco — a former child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. More than 30,000 children like her — up to a quarter of them girls — have been forcibly recruited by Joseph Kony’s forces in the last two decades to fight against President Yoweri Museveni’s government.

We sit in the shade of a mango tree, taking refuge from a midday sun that is doing its best to caramelize the russet-red clay of the Kitgum roads. Alice tells me about her life with the rebel group. She holds my gaze, pausing only occasionally as the odd boda-boda drives by.

Abducted from her home when she was just 12, Alice spent more than three years in the bush with the LRA. She was a porter, a babysitter, a trained fighter. She was never officially given as a wife, but the commander for whom she babysat raped her.

But we have been force-fed the media image of a child soldier as a teenage boy gripping a Kalashnikov, a necklace of bullets draped around his narrow shoulders, sky-high on drugs and booze. Female abductees have typically been portrayed as passive pawns — powerless sex slaves or bush wives.

Alice shatters this stereotype.

“ Chapu was the name of a great group of fighters in the LRA which the government’s army feared very much,” she says. “Because I was a great fighter, I was made to join Chapu.”

She smiles proudly.

Paradoxically, in a country that is traditionally patriarchal, many abducted women attained an elevated social status within the LRA. This was typically achieved by becoming one of the wives of a commander. But women in the LRA also earned respect through skill and bravery on the battlefield.

Alice was eventually injured in a skirmish with government troops in South Sudan. Shot in the leg, she was left to die on the battlefield.

Alice says it took a week to haul herself to a nearby town, where she was transferred to a rehabilitation centre for returnees.

But three years on, Alice is still struggling to resume normal life.

She misses her life with the LRA, a surprisingly common sentiment among returnees in Uganda. The feeling is most acute for women, who face huge additional hurdles — primarily having to raise children born illegitimately.

The women say that — unlike the Ugandan government — the LRA at least fed, clothed and housed them and their children.

“I am slowly getting used to this new life, but whenever I encounter difficulties here I get depressed,” Alice says. “I sometimes feel that it would be good if I was in the bush still because at least there I had power and access to whatever I wanted.”

I ask her what she means.

“In the bush, you can get what you want from people because you have a gun — but here I do not have a gun. In the bush, we were free to do anything we want without much control. You could ambush vehicles, you could loot.”

She still has violent impulses.

“Even now when I see a civilian, I feel very angry and want to attack them like we were trained to do in the bush. It is the same when I see army soldiers.”

Alice suffers from a common dual vulnerability among child soldiers: victim and perpetrator. As a victim, she was abducted from her home, beaten and raped. As a perpetrator, she has killed.

Consequently, she has not been welcomed back to her old community. They talk behind her back and hurl insults as she waits in line for water: “Wife of Kony,” they sneer. .

Though the guns have been silent in northern Uganda for more than half a decade, these women are still struggling to survive years after returning to their communities. Women abductees cannot support their families, having missed education and getting inadequate job training by non-governmental organizations. Many return home HIV-positive or injured, but are too poor to afford treatment.

Five of these women, including Alice, agreed to be the subject of even greater scrutiny, and were given digital cameras to document their post-conflict lives. Sick of being poked and prodded by academics and journalists, this approach meant the women felt they were collaborators in telling their own stories.

The resulting research has been published on a multimedia website at www.dwogpaco.com .

“We were given some normal classroom teaching — basics like how to read and write, to do simple arithmetic,” Alice says. “But they mainly taught us how to use a gun and to kill.”

Alice pulls out her cellphone — donated by an NGO, she says — to prove a point.

Contacts. Clock. Messages.

She reads out, haltingly, the few words she knows in English. Words she only learned by having the phone.

Former child soldiers are twice as likely to be illiterate. This is because the majority were abducted between Grades 6 and 7 — aged 11 or 12 — when Ugandan students typically learn to read and write.

Alice says her lack of English has severely hurt her chances of landing a good job. Without an education, she figures she will end up working on someone’s land or turning to prostitution.

When she first came back from the bush, she resorted to brewing lujutu — a potent spirit made from cassava — to make ends meet. Brewing alcohol for sale at home is illegal, but she says that local authorities tolerate it.

But tailoring has been taught by so many NGOs and reception centres over the last decade that the trade’s marketability has ironically been reduced. Throw a ball of yarn in any northern Uganda market from Gulu to Lira, and you’ll hit a woman who has been through one of these programs.

The women are also now competing with cheap, imported goods from China and a steady influx of second-hand clothes from the West.

“Yes, it is clear that the market is saturated with very many tailors, and there is also a great deal of competition as there are some people who underwent more advanced tailoring training,” says Jimmy Opio, a co-ordinator at KIWEPI, one of the organizations offering training.

“The one year of training we offer would not make the person compete favourably in the market . . . we lack the funds.”

Why then does KIWEPI, in light of these limitations, continue with its inadequate training?

Something is always better than nothing, he says.

“It was a cheap solution to a complex problem,” says Dennis Okwir, a manager at the Empowering Hands NGO in Gulu. “This type of training was very affordable. Most organizations did not take into account if they really needed this type of training.”

This is not to downplay the difficulties faced by men. Indeed, Dr. Christopher Dolan, director of the Refugee Law Project in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, says male rape — or tek gungu — was common by both the LRA and government forces and has largely been ignored by NGOs. Dolan argues that, in a macho and homophobic society, rape is more stigmatizing for men, yet men don’t get the same services as sexually abused women.

Stella Omona, a specialist in gender and peace studies at Gulu University, says that formerly abducted men have been left behind by NGOs. “In the last 20 years I would estimate that 80 to 90 per cent of all beneficiaries of aid have been women.”

Ryan Butyniec, a longtime researcher in northern Uganda, says it is easier for NGOs to focus on women.

“In terms of advertising budget, it goes down a lot easier with the viewers. If I put out a development program aimed at women, who’s going to contest that women have been abused?

“Whereas for men, it’s definitely going to be a harder sell for CARE International to have a man standing there saying ‘I was raped during the conflict and I need same support as the women.’”

But, unlike male returnees, women like Alice have come back with children. They often struggle to feed and clothe their family — let alone find the time or money to go to school themselves.

Men also typically have a greater number of employment options — as labourers, boda-boda drivers, carpenters.

The 2008 Survey for War-Affected Youth estimated that young women who return with children had nearly one-third less education. Very few are willing to face the finger-pointing they would encounter at school, or they are unable to take their children with them due to a lack of daycare.

Alice says her abduction has ruined her chances of finding a respectable man to marry.

“When I initially came back from the bush one boy seduced me and I had two children with him,” she tells me quietly. “But later he started calling me a rebel and that he was scared I would cut his throat in his sleep.

“He used my past as an excuse to leave me.”

Alice says she took out her anger on her two children, ignoring them for months.

“I wanted to throw them in a pit latrine, so my parents have taken care of the children until now. It is the children that make my life feel ruined. My mother already has seven children and I don’t want to burden her further.”

One week, Alice missed one of our interviews. I found out later she had been rushed to hospital to stem heavy uterine bleeding — the result of constant rape in the LRA. She also contracted syphilis.

Upon her return, Alice says her alcoholic father pimped her out to an army soldier for a bicycle and booze.

Alice also tells me of the chest pain she experiences from carrying heavy loads and the constant beatings she received.

To this day, she is haunted by what the Acholi — a northern Ugandan tribe — call cen . These are the vengeful spirits of those she killed in the bush. It’s what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

“There was some woman who we killed in a group. She still comes to me in a dream telling me that ‘my daughter, you are killing me for nothing.’

“Others that I killed appear in an open grave and they talk to me. I normally wake up then; I get a terrible heartbeat and start crying.”

Three years on, she still wakes up to find their gaunt, shrink-wrapped faces leering over her. Three years on, she wakes to find their hands around her neck, strangling her.

Prayers have reduced the nightmares, although one spirit continues to haunt her.

“It is a man I personally killed because when we abducted him, he slapped me,” she says. “I pierced him with my bayonet.

“He comes into my dreams often, but he always lies face down on the ground. He never talks to me.”

A number of studies suggest the prevalence of PTSD among child soldiers in northern Uganda is between 54 and 74 per cent. Rates of depression range between 44 and 67 per cent.

According to a World Health Organization report from 2005, the Ugandan government spends less than 1 per cent of its health budget on mental health — far below the recommended 5 per cent.

At the district level, there is no specific budget for mental health.

Trained psychiatric personnel are strikingly absent from many health centres, particularly in more rural regions.

But NGOs, as well as the government, also seem to be unable to help the mentally ill.

I found that counselling sessions conducted by NGO staff were often brief, lackadaisical affairs of two to three meetings. Rather than confront their past, counsellors encouraged them to simply forget their bush traumas.

Dennis Eyalu, a social worker for the Lira-based NGO Centre for Children in Vulnerable Situations (CCVS), told me how he counsels returnees experiencing cen .

“You ask them, ‘When you are alone, what do you do?’ As she gives you the answer, you inform them that really they are hearing voices because they are overthinking. The only way of dealing with that is staying with friends or by coping through prayers.”

Eyalu undoubtedly cares for these women. But to dismiss PTSD as simply overthinking was staggering.

I ask Dennis how long he’s been a social worker.

Two years, he replies. Before that, he was a cashier for a brewery.

Dennis tells me CCVS tries to visit the women in town at least every two weeks, but many of the women they help live in remote villages outside of Lira. A round-trip can cost around 20,000-30,000 shillings, or $10 — money the organization cannot spare.

Those women who live far away must depend on God’s mercy, he says.

However, a follow-up visit with another organization — the Kitgum-based KICWA — showed the issues weren’t purely monetary.

The young counsellor, upon arriving at the family compound, conversed briefly with the woman. The counsellor said the woman was doing well since their last meeting.

However, my subsequent interview with the woman contradicted what turned out to be a typically cursory analysis. The woman told me she was still suffering stigmatization from the community and was unable to work because her sewing machine was broken.

Grace is another formerly abducted woman who passed through the KICWA centre in 2001.

“The only help I got at KICWA was some counselling . . . after I left the centre they never made any follow-up on me as they promised. That was many years ago now. . . . I feel if I go on talking, it will bring back many bad memories and it will break my heart even more.”

I ask Okwir, the Empowering Hands manager, his opinion of psychosocial support efforts in northern Uganda.

“We had so many children returning and too few reception centres and we didn’t have enough psychotherapists. So if you were friendly with them, sang with them, then that meant you were a good counsellor.

“But being nice was the thing. It didn’t take care of individual aggravation in captivity, or coping mechanisms. I wish that these people had helped these women develop personal development plans, so that we know for each person what the issue is and how we’re going to overcome it.”

Okwir acknowledges these women cannot successfully reintegrate until they have come to terms with their abduction.

Mental health and psychological distress in the post-conflict region of northern Uganda also hurts the rehabilitation of the community itself. Restoring normality, reducing humiliation and resentment are essential to sustainable peace and recovery.

I ask Alice if she feels her counselling at KIWEPI helped her.

“Yes, it has made me more merciful, my nightmares are fewer and I am now able to forgive compared to when I was in the bush.”

I ask her the same question a month later. It’s the last time that I see Alice.

“I am still living with difficulties, and sometimes I consider suicide.”

Alice remains a contradiction.

Marc Ellison is a Vancouver-based photojournalist. In the summer of 2011 he interviewed 40 formerly abducted women about their post-abduction difficulties. As a part of the project, Ellison gave a number of the women digital cameras to allow them to tell their own stories. The resulting research, funded by an International Development Research Centre award, can be found at www.dwogpaco.com .

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